Entertainment

What 90,000 Hours of Home Video Can Teach Us About Ourselves

“Imagine if you could record your life … so you can go back and find memorable moments and relive them.” So began the talk at TED from Deb Roy of MIT Media Labs on Wednesday, a revelation of fascinating findings from more than three years of continuous data capture of his family’s home life.

Starting with the birth of his son, Roy began recording every room in his home using bird's-eye-view cameras, feeding that data back to an array of servers. In all, he collected more than 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio, which Roy jokingly referred to as “the world’s largest home video collection.”

While all of that will help us “experience moments your [natural] memory could never find,” it has also led to some significant research findings.

Roy showed a number of visualizations showing what he calls “the birth of a word.” By connecting motion analysis from the video and time-lapse audio, for example, Roy is able to show his son’s use of the word “water” takes place primarily in the kitchen, while use of the word “bye” is heaviest near the front door of his house. He’s also able to see the impact different caregivers (himself, his wife and his nanny) had on the development of his son’s language.

In another impressive display of the possibilities created by his setup, Roy delighted the TED crowd by playing audio that shows how the word “gaga” transformed into “water” over a six-month period. In all, Roy identified 503 words his son had learned by his second birthday and the patterns leading to their birth.

Of course, creating the type of environment that Roy did is not yet feasible for most of us, and the product has not yet been commercialized. The first application of it, however, is Bluefin Labs, a startup Roy launched back in February that analyzes social media conversations around television content using the same type of data and pattern correlation he used in researching his family.

Roy said he also sees potential applications in science, commerce and government but left the audience with a moving example from his initial experiment that points to the possibilities of capturing our whole lives digitally: video of his son’s first steps.

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